Congress is actively debating whether to retain President Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy that are due to expire at the end of this year. President Obama supports extending tax cuts for households with incomes under $250,000, but ending the tax breaks for higher income households.

Here are five good reasons for Congress to let them go.

1. Borrowing to Give the Rich Tax Breaks is a Really Bad Idea. We've already borrowed $700 billion since 2001 to pay for these tax cuts. Maintaining them for another decade would cost an estimated $700 billion, plus interest on the national debt estimated at $126 billion. Does it really make sense to send interest payments to China and millionaire bond-holders in the U.S. -so that we can cut taxes for U.S. millionaires and billionaires?

2. There are 700 Billion Better Ways to Use the Money. Consider the superior ways to spend $700 billion. We could use a portion to reduce budget deficits. We could make long overdue investments in infrastructure such as bridges, roadways, railroads, water treatment facilities, retrofitting buildings -things that make our economy strong and competitive. We could direct funds to make the transition to the new economy that is less dependent on foreign oil. In the short-term, all these investments would create millions of jobs. In the long term, it would put the economy on better footing for the future. There are a billion better ways to use the money.

3. Restores Balance to Tax Code. Over the last half century, Congress has steadily reduced tax obligations for the very rich and global corporations. Between 1960 and 2004, the top 0.1 percent of U.S. taxpayers -the wealthiest one in one thousand -have seen the share of their income paid in total federal taxes drop from 60 to 33.6 percent. Restoring the tax rates to pre-2001 levels would be a very slight increase, yet begin the process of rebalancing the tax code.

4. It Won't Hurt the Economy. You've heard the blather about how taxing the rich is going to hurt the economy. But cutting the taxes for the wealthy are an ineffective way to help the economy. A recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Service ranked 11 strategies to spur the economy and create jobs. Cutting taxes for the rich was the worst ranked strategy. Here' the reality: Taxing the rich is different than taxing the middle class. According to Moody's, the rich save more of their tax cuts while working people and middle class spend it in the economy. Over the last decade, the top wealth holders have shifted trillions of dollars into speculative investments that have hurt the economy.

5. Reduces the Dangerous Concentration of Wealth and Power. We're living in a period of unprecedented economic inequality. A recent series by Tim Noah in the online journal Slate examined the "Growing Divergence" of wealth and income. Taxes is one of the ways we reduce these inequalities.

A final reason is that the U.S. public supports letting these tax cuts for the rich expire. A recent Gallup Poll reveals that 59 percent of the population support letting the tax cuts for the rich expire -while 37 percent support extending them. Polls rarely reveal support for any form of taxation -which indicates that a majority of Americans -including those who will pay the higher taxes - recognize the imprudence of extending them. Alan Greenspan, who supported the tax cuts in 2001, has now reversed his position and believes the time has come to raise taxes.

In Do It Anyway (Beacon Press, 2010), author Courtney E. Martin looks at the work and lives of eight activists who are striving to make a difference in their communities and the world. Among others, we meet Raul Diaz, a prison re-entry social worker at Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles.

Diaz recorded this video to explain what Homeboy Industries does and why he works there. (Watch video below or at YouTube.)

Mother Jones magazine recently ran an adapted excerpt about Diaz from Do It Anyway.

Raul Diaz is crushing flowers underfoot as he runs. Though he doesn't have the stamina of his teenage years, he's grateful that his legs can still take him up a hill at thirty-four. He pauses at the top of a slope in Elysian Park, puts his hands on his hips, and looks out at Los Angeles, the city that has formed him in all of its beauty and violence. He can almost make out the outlines of Boyle Heights, his courageous little neighborhood—just east of downtown L.A. and the Los Angeles River, César E. Chávez Avenue rolling boldly through.

Up here Raul can get a break from life down there—the way the boys drag their feet as they head back to their cells in Chino when his visits with them are over, the sadly predictable swollen bellies on teenage girls hanging out in the project playground, the incessant needs of his clients (housing, jobs, work clothes, car insurance, food), unmet unless he figures out a way to meet them. He runs up here because it's a way to leave all that behind. But even more, he runs up here because he has never figured out any other way of staving off the sadness.

The youngest of eight brothers, Raul was raised by one firecracker mom who fled an abusive husband, the father of her six initial sons, in Texas and relocated to the Pico projects of Boyle Heights without a single friend in 1968. In the early seventies, she met Raul's father—a Vietnam vet—who would end up shirking responsibility for his two kids. By the time Raul was five years old, his father was mostly absent, with the exception of a few random Saturdays when he would pull into the parking lot of the projects and start drinking. On those days he might show one of the boys how to fix a car or give them advice about girls, but Raul mostly stayed away.

"Don't get me wrong," he says. "I wanted a dad, but I realized that not having a dad at all was sometimes better than having one that abused you."

In our hometown, Stephen Puleo's event Monday night at the Boston Public Library, featuring his bookDark Tide, was a huge success. The BPL needed an overflow room once Rabb Hall filled up, and the crowd loved Puleo's stories about the Great Molasses Flood. It was the Boston Globe's first foray into a citywide reading program, and we hope they'll do it again. (Especially since the first-runner-up in the voting was another Beacon book, All Souls by Michael Patrick MacDonald.)

David Chura is the author ofI Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like
Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. He has worked with at-risk
teenagers for the past 40 years. For 26 of those years, he taught
English and creative writing in community based alternative schools and
in a county penitentiary. His writings have appeared in the New York
Times as well as other scholarly and literary journals.

Sex and power -- forces rampant in our prison system, thwarted and
twisted by the jail culture. Lock up large numbers of the same gender
and the frustrated sexual energy is palpable. Likewise, in jail everyone
-- wardens, correctional officers, inmates -- wants power, fights for
it, manipulates for it, in a place where everyone is made to feel
impotent. The locked up teenagers I taught over a ten year period in an
adult county facility and about whom I write in I Don't Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup,
had a great image for that lack of power: crabs in a bucket, stepping
over each other, pulling down the ones closest to the top, so nobody
wins.

Sex and power, as everyone knows, are the ingredients of rape.
Consequently, the prison rape numbers are high. According to the Bureau
of Justice Statistics 88,500 incarcerated adults were sexually abused --
by correctional staff or other inmates -- in 2009. This number doesn't
include the kids who have been sexually victimized while locked up, an
even higher percentage.

Disturbing numbers made even more disturbing by the fact that seven
years ago the George W. Bush congress (surprisingly) passed the Prison
Rape Elimination Act.

It's a good bill that raised the alarm regarding widespread prison
sexual assaults. It also established the National Prison Rape
Elimination Commission to investigate and make recommendations on how
best to stop prisoner sexual abuse. In June 2009 the Commission finally
released its report setting out certain reforms. However, the Obama
administration has yet to adopt those findings.

In the book, Miller relates the scintillating story of how a powerful band of Brahmin moral crusaders helped make Boston the most straitlaced city in America, forever linked with the infamous catchphrase "Banned in Boston." You can read a sample chapter on Scribd.

In their heyday, the Watch and Ward operated from the lofty heights of Beacon Hill, in their headquarters at 41 Mt. Vernon St. This address is very familiar to those of us here at Beacon Press...

... because it's where we work!

Given Beacon's great commitment to publishing "dangerous" work, and our numerous books examining the history and importance of free speech (From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act,Free for All, Worst Instincts, to name a few), it's interesting to think about the meetings held here by the city's moral guardians. The Watch and Ward, in their efforts to keep scintillating material out of the hands of readers, sent out secret orders from this address banning countless works, including modern classics by Hemingway, Faulkner, and Sinclair Lewis, and went to
war with publishing and literary giants such as Alfred A. Knopf and The Atlantic Monthly (who, in another ironic twist, also once had offices at 41 Mt. Vernon).

In this video, Neil Miller explains another surprising connection to the Watch and Ward.

Withers took some of the pictures that we remember most about that long-ago but still-present era when blacks struggled to break the back of a terrorist state and win their full rights as citizens. They marched and got beaten by mobs and cops. They signed up to vote and they lost their jobs and homes. They sang and they got thrown into jail. They spoke up and their churches and homes got shot at and burned.

Withers documented the trial in the Emmett Till case in 1955 and the planning for the Poor People's March in 1968. He took pictures of Martin Luther King marching, riding a bus in Montgomery after the boycott, relaxing behind closed doors before his death. He took the iconic picture of sanitation workers marching in Memphis, bearing the signs "I Am A Man," in the days before King's assassination. He recorded demonstrations all over. He took pictures of those quintessential American institutions, jazz and baseball, which gave expression to black aspirations even while holding blacks down.

And now, after combing documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and matching reports of an informant named in FBI files as ME 338-R with a memo matching Withers to that tag, the Commercial Appeal reveals that Withers gave the FBI hounds information that J. Edgar Hoover and his henchmen could use to disrupt the civil rights and peace movements. The period of Withers's activity is not clear; so far it looks like Withers worked for the FBI from 1968 to 1970.

First, there was Fist Stick Knife Gun, a memoir by Geoffrey Canada, President and Chief Executive Officer of Harlem Children's Zone. The Zone was praised by the New York Times as "… one of the most ambitious social experiments of
our time. It combines educational, social and medical services. It
starts at birth and follows children to college. It meshes those
services into an interlocking web, and then it drops that web over an
entire neighborhood … The objective is to create a safety net woven so
tightly that children in the neighborhood just can't slip through." Canada has been called, "One of the few authentic heroes of New York and one of the best friends children have, or ever will have, in our nation." And Publisher's Weekly said of his memoir, "A more powerful depiction of the tragic life of urban children and a
more compelling plea to end 'America's war against itself' cannot be
imagined."

A couple years ago, Beacon Press began work on a few graphic books. Fist Stick Knife Gun was one of the first titles chosen, and Jamar Nicholas was brought on board by editor Allison Trzop to bring it to reality. Jamar posted on the blog early in the process, and shared some sketches with us along the way:

Over the past twenty-five years, the practice of medicine has been subverted by the business of medicine, sacrificing old-style doctoring to fit the values of consumer capitalism. InWhite Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine, physician and moral philosopher Carl Elliott traces for the first time the evolutionary path of this new direction in health care, revealing the dangerous underbelly of the beast that has emerged. We're introduced to the often shifty characters who work the production line in Big Pharma: the professional guinea pigs who test-pilot new drugs; the ghostwriters who pen "scientific" articles for drug manufacturers; the PR specialists who manufacture "news" bulletins; the drug reps who will do practically anything to get their numbers up; the "thought leaders" who travel the world to enlighten the medical community about the wonders of the latest release; even, finally, the ethicists who oversee all this from their pharma-funded perches.

Check out Carl Elliott's recent clinical trial expose in Mother Jones, and his piece on Big Pharma's Thought Leaders in the Chronicle Review.

David Chura has worked with at-risk teenagers for forty years. His book, I Don't Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine, documents the lives of children in adult lockups and how we as individuals and as a society have ultimately failed them.

Over any teacher's career—in my case, 26 years of teaching high school English to at-risk teenagers, the last 10 of those years in an adult county jail—you get asked lots of questions. Some about the topic you're teaching; others, well, it's hard to know where they come from. But there's one question I heard a lot, most frequently from my jail students, "Why don't you teach in a real school?"

This usually happened when a lesson went well and a kid really got what we were talking about. "That was a good lesson, Mr. C. You should teach in a real school instead of here." That last part was typical of incarcerated kids. Instead of taking credit for understanding some new idea, the student was quick to give it to me.

I knew where the "real school" remark came from. My students were mostly poor youth of color; many bereft of families. The education they received in their home districts was pretty bogus, and they knew it. Minimal supplies. School buildings as dilapidated as the warehouses (called "public housing") they lived in. The curriculum dummied down because "they can't handle the real thing." For these locked up kids a "real school" was one they weren't in.

They knew my take on the "real school" remark. My classroom was a real school; they were real students doing real learning; and I expected them to act that way. I confess, I wasn't always polite about it. It made me mad—at them; at the educational system; at society; at myself. And it made me sad because within that comment was their bone-deep belief that they were worthless.

But in their remarks I heard another question. It's a question every teacher asks with each new school year, "Why do I teach?" For me it was, "Why teach the hard to reach—at-risk kids—in the first place?" It's a fair question, one that deserves an answer.

While one man and his small group of followers in
Gainesville, Florida are talking about burning copies of the Quran on 9/11,
it's been thrilling to see America's secular and religious communities reacting
in solidarity. Religious leaders,
including Peter Morales, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association,
are calling on their communities to read the Quran. The Mass Bible society has a project to
donate two copies of the Quran for every one burned. For those
who would like to take the opportunity to read at least some passages from the
Quran, you'll find some excerpts here.

Courtney E. Martin is a senior correspondent for the American Prospect and an editor of Feministing.com. A 2002 recipient of the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics, she is the author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, coauthor of The Naked Truth, and coeditor of Click. Her work frequently appears in the Christian Science Monitor, Alternet, and Publishers Weekly, among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn. The following is from a post on Alternet adapted from her new book, Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists.

Save the world.

Where were you the first time you heard those three little words?

It’s a phrase that has slipped off the tongues of hippie parents and well-intentioned teachers with a sort of cruel ease for the last three decades. In Evangelical churches and Jewish summer camps, on 3-2-1 Contact and Dora the Explorer, even on MTV, we (America’s youth) have been charged with the vaguest and most ethically dangerous of responsibilities: save the world. But what does it really mean? What has it ever really meant -- when uttered by moms and ministers, by zany aunts and debate coaches -- to save the whole wildly complex, horrifically hypocritical, overwhelmingly beautiful world?

Social scientists and the media seems to have made an ugly habit in the last few years of labeling my generation as entitled, self absorbed, and apathetic. Psychologist Jean M. Twenge argues that, largely because of the boom in self-esteem education in the '80s and '90s, young people today “speak the language of the self as their native tongue,” in her book Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable Than Ever Before. Tom Friedman dubbed us Generation Q for quiet in the pages of The New York Times,
writing, “Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good,
and for the country’s own good.” And morning shows can’t resist a
segment on how entitled Gen Y is in the workplace and what their bosses
can do to tame their positively gargantuan egos.

I think they’ve
got it wrong. They’re missing a class analysis. And they’ve mistaken
symptoms for the disease. We are not, on the whole, entitled, self
absorbed, and apathetic. We’re overwhelmed, empathic, and paralyzed. The
privileged among us, are told over and over that it is our charge to
“save the world,” but once in it, we realize that it’s not so simple.
The less privileged are gifted their own empty rhetoric -- American
Dream ideology that charges them with, perhaps not necessarily saving
the whole damn world, but at the very least saving their families, their
countries, their honor. We are the most educated, most wanted, most
diverse generation in American history, and we are also the most
conscious of complexity.Read the rest at Alternet.

Picture this: three long-haired college kids are unloading crates of food from the bed of a battered pick-up truck. It's parked curbside at the Androscoggin Food Co-op located in the equally battered mill town of Lewiston, Maine. The year is 1971 and these kids are, unbeknownst to them, the vanguard of the local food movement.

They've spent the day rounding up goods directly from local farms and food processors, not because they're devout locavores (the word wouldn't be invented for another 35 years) but because sourcing locally was the cheapest way to get food for a co-op whose members were largely lower income. Some crates are full of apples from a nearby orchard; others contain 12-pound wheels of a so-so cheddar from a small cheese plant; and one cardboard box contains 30 dozen eggs from a chicken farm only 10 miles down the road. That box is labeled DeCoster Farms.

Yes, the product of this family egg farm (now headquartered in Iowa) at the eye of the current salmonella storm was being handled contentedly by these prehistoric foodies, I among them. As a company that was started with 125 hens in the mid-1960s by Austin "Jack" DeCoster in the farm town of Turner (pronounced "Turna" by everybody except out-of-state college kids), it was as local as you could get.

Funny how times change. Jack, now 71, was an ambitious man who wasn't going to be happy selling locally produced eggs just in northern New England. According to one DeCoster employee, Jack is a born-again Christian who doesn't engage in any leisure pursuits other than work, which he apparently pursues 18-hours a day. With a work ethic like that, growth was inevitable. Now operating under the names of Wright County Egg and Quality Egg, Jack's egg empire now produces 2.3 million dozen eggs a week in Iowa while his "starter" farm back in Turner, renamed Maine Contract Farming, keeps 3.5 million hens gainfully employed.

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship winner (2008), Builder Levy has photographed in New York City’s inner city communities where he was a New York City teacher of at-risk adolescents for 35 years; at civil rights and peace demonstrations in the 1960s and the new millennium; in Mongolia, Cuba, and other developing nations; and since 1968 to the present, has been visiting and photographing life in coalfield Appalachia. His work intertwines social documentary, street and art photography. Here, Levy shares his memories and a photo he took at the 1963 March on Washington.

When I got off the bus I was a little disoriented because it was almost too peaceful and relaxed. Yet crowded, full of people, mostly people of color, but people of every color, whichever way you looked. The crowds stretched from the Lincoln Memorial back to the Washington Monument. The signs read “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” I saw contingents with people wearing their labor union caps. Miraculously, I met my brother, Jay, there. He had come from out west, on his way home from a cross-country road trip he had made that summer. There were plenty of police—the media had warned of violence! But it was very peaceful. I had been inspired by Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Martin Luther King in the mid-fifties while I was still in junior high school in Brooklyn, New York. As I was entering Stuyvesant High School in New York City, I remember being inspired by the heroic Black students integrating Central High School—the Little Rock Nine, who were being escorted by the federal troops to Central High School through crowds of hate after Arkansas governor Orval Faubus had used state National Guardsmen to block them from entering days earlier. I had marched on Washington for integrated schools, in 1957. In support of the southern students picketing and boycotting Woolworth’s, we picketed Woolworth’s in New York City, in 1960.

That day in Washington, the signs read “For Jobs and Freedom.” I was walking around, looking for faces, groups, something that would help me find the meaning of the march. What was significant was its enormous size—more than a quarter-million, probably 300,000 people. Also significant to me was that it had such a strong labor union component of support. One of the main organizers was A. Phillip Randolph, organizer and founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and founder and president of the Negro American Labor Council. The fact that the march had a broad coalition, a unity of all the major civil rights organizations, including SNCC and the NAACP, as well as SCLC, the Urban League, and CORE, was of great import also.

I was near the Lincoln Memorial. I tried listening to the speeches and songs. King would speak near the very end. Shortly before King delivered his speech, Mahalia Jackson began singing. I noticed a contingent from the South (where the current front lines of the freedom struggle were). I think it was an NAACP group from Atlanta, Georgia. Within the group, a young black woman wearing a dark kerchief on her head caught my eye. She was in the brilliant, bright, hot summer sunlight, standing out from, but still within and a part of, the crowd. I moved closer, composed and focused razor-sharp on the woman. Her face/gaze reflected for me the intensity of the long and continuing struggle, from the arrival of the first Africans sold into bondage in Jamestown in 1619, to Harriet Tubman, John Brown and Frederick Douglass, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Abraham Lincoln, Sojourner Truth, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, the Scottsboro Boys, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King, the student sit-ins, in Greensboro, John Lewis, Medgar Evers! Her clasped hands seemed to offer an expression of hope.

A young white man, perhaps a student like me, was to the young woman’s left. A well-dressed black man in a hat and sport jacket was to the right with his back facing me. They, as well as the rest of the crowd behind the woman, gave her the context of the mass multiracial demonstration, but they did not need to be sharply focused.

Although I never did get much of a vantage point to get good crowd photographs of the historic march, this photograph captures for me the meaning of the March on Washington.